Power amplifiers, they are simple yet very important parts of a sound system. When you need them, you need all of them, three out of four will just not do. And so began yet another chapter of-

 The tale of endless woe...

Were shall I begin? Shall I blame paypal for crimping my cashflow on the job to the point where I had to put off my order of the power amps until my vender had run out of them? Of course the fact that the manufacturer had discontinued one specific model of the three amps that I specified did nothing to speed up delivery on the backorder. 

The fact that this little tidbit of information had not yet been officially released to the public made matters even more frustrating when attempts to shop around for what should have been an "off the shelf item revealed that for that month at least, no one in the country had any stock on hand (remember that no one had yet been told of the impending dicontinuance of the model number in question, so of course retailers all over the country are taking back orders on this hot item!).

But let me stop blaming and simply state the facts as they were, and remind you that this in and of itself would have been of little consequence, had it been the only difficulty encountered in the process of placing orders, negotiating inexpensive shipping, and coordinating a work schedule based on the ship and arrival dates of the equipment. The fact of the matter was that all sorts of things kept conspiring to keep us from completing this job.

So, here we were now, something like six weeks behind schedule, and we needed this power amp now! (I won't trouble you at just this moment with the fact that one of my two EAW side-fill monitors had yet to arrive as scheduled, that speaker would actually arrive the following week, which would leave just the power amplifier missing and no commitment to a delivery date from the manufacturer. Bear in mind that one week from where I am telling the story now would put us seven weeks behind schedule and do nothing for the good disposition of the client!)

So to shorten slightly the extraordinarily long telling of a horror beyond the collection of adjectives in the English language to describe, yet another week passed with little or no progress. I was at this point in the venture that I, in what can only be said to be a less than pleasant demeanure, approached my partner with the following request- "Go find it even if you have to beat someone over the head with a fluffy pillow to get it!" 

Lo and behold! He did just that, and didn't even have to resort to any such measures of violence.  He managed to find locally, a store display model, at a discounted price, of the very same amplifier that no one had. It was probably the only one of maybe two or three sitting in stores on the whole east coast. This was a fine moment indeed!

At last we had everything we needed to get started, schedules were set, the sun was shining, birds where singing and the days were clear and blue! I believe the word "WEEEEEEE!!!!" described fully the sense of elation as we all went to bed that night, thinking how tommorrow morning we would finally begin the process of installing this sound system...

      ...We were so enthusiastic, yet little did we know what lay ahead.

But of course, that portion of the story shall have to wait for another episode of "THE TALE OF ENDLESS WOE"...

See you all for now! - The Wizard of AMS Systems.

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